mia_wallace's Profile

Does anyone know if the new location is open? I had a sad moment of trying to go to their old Huron location last week and staring at the vacant space in total sadness. That led to a not so special meal at Simon Sushi (my first time there, but that's another post, I think). I was a bit surprised that there was no sign anywhere saying where they'd moved to and that there website hasn't been updated with the new address yet. :(

Thanks for the recommendations, guys. I'll be staying in Squamish for the most part, so I'm sure I will be visiting Sunflower Cafe. We will spending some time in Vancouver, so I'm really excited to try some food. We really don't have izakayas in toronto, so that sounds like a lot of fun to check out. Market's prix fixe sounds really perfect, I just had a look at the menu. It seems to include 2 plates + a dessert, I'm guessing that would be mean one of their raw, appetizer or soup/salad menus and then a meat or fish.

Hello everyone!I'm a chowhounder from Toronto that will be coming to Vancouver and Squamish around New Year's. I'm really excited, I've never made it out west before. As excited as I am to see the mountains, ocean and temperate rainforests, my most burning questions is "where to eat?!"

Where are some favourite Chow spots? I'm on a pretty tight budget, so recommendations for sushi, great ethnic cuisine, breakfast joints and maybe ONE place to splash out a little for a nice dinner would be amazing.

See, you can't not like King's Noodles, it's bad news in this town! I swear, I read so many glowing reviews about their classic won ton soup and figured that would be the safest bet. Is braised beef with rice noodles a soup dish? What makes it yumm?

King's Noodles!I have never really enjoyed the food that I've had here for some reason. I work and live very close to Chinatown and just learned to avoid this place. In a search for good soups in Chinatown online, I kept coming across posts about King's Noodles' won ton soup. I went there again today, dealt with the gruff service and ended up with wontons filled with dark purple spongey meat that sort of put me off. The broth was nice initally, but overall, I wasn't thrilled at all.

I feel like this place is a classic and well-loved by so many, so I feel like I should like it...yet don't!

Coconut Grove on dundas (west of bay, east of university) used to serve fantastic and incredibly priced rotis-- heavenly goat, ethereal chicken curry and lovely vegetable options like squash and spinach. The owners have changed ( i think last summer) and the food quality has become really pitiable (think a spoonful of gristle and some sad sauce being the filling for an entire roti) and of course, the price has gone up too. Really too bad, the old owners and staff used to brighten my day. :(

I think their spring rolls are amazing, they're really fresh and full of cabbage and carrot and not the sad mushy noodle/cabbage combo that curses so many spring rolls elsewhere. Also great is their 3 kind of mushrooms soup, really delicate broth, lots of mushrooms with noodles or without, and you can season as you like at the table. For a noodle dish, I always go with one that's called something like "fried e-fu noodle with vegetable" on the menu. It's just crispy yellow chowmein noodles covered with sauce, bok choy a bit of tempeh and vegetables and it's very satisfying. The imitation duck people love, but I'm not crazy about it. I tried some taro or yam roll dish there once that was weird (deep fried taro served with a sweet and sour sauce with pineapple and red peppers) but strangely addictive.

My partner and I were thinking of celebrating my bday dinner tonight but are perplexed about where to go. We were thinking of Japango (an old favourite of mine), but they don't seem to be answering their phone, and I was also secretly considering Scaramouche because of their prix fixe lobster menu.

Basically, I'm looking for something really budget-friendly but high on exquisite yumminess. I would like a glass of wine with my dinner and ideally, dinner for two would not reach 100.

Hey-- I just looked Didier has Prix Fixe menu for February 2009 that looks phenomenal!!! It's 58 a person and includes a drooooool-worthy first course, main and dessert, so you could still afford wine and tip. http://www.restaurantdidier.com/site/...

This place is wonderful, both in its slightly cheaper and homey and sort of swanky/pricer incarnations. I'e never had anything I didn't really enjoy there-- it's one of the few vegetarian eating experiences in restaurants where you're not even conscious of the absence of meat. Yum, I wish I still lived around the corner from 668.

There's a place called Red and White on Yonge (at Gould, I think) that has a very good chicken shwarma plate. It's about 6.99 and it's ginormous, with very nicely done chicken, rice, hummus, and some in-house pickled cabbage and turnips that are quite refreshing. I find the food there to have a higher quality of ingredients and consistency than most fast-food places.

I haven't had arancini anywhere other than at Fusaro's. I felt like it needed something when I had it, (perhaps more cheese? It's hard to say without knowing what it's supposed to taste like), but I know people who are addicted to it there.

It's my father's 70th birthday on Wednesday, so I thought I would try and make him Gateau Basque, a dessert he loves but hasn't had in years and years.

Does anyone have a very good recipe for this? I'd prefer a recipe for the pastry cream version without the cherries (there's two traditional types). If anything, I would prefer to have a black cherry compote instead of actually bake the gateau with preserved cherries inside.

I had to resurrect this to add on a particularly vile guilty pleasure: the breakfast sandwich at tim horton's with sausage, egg and cheese on a biscuit. i just had one and am both ashamed and thrilled!

Just got back this evening!The mosquitoes were most vicious and I have a lovely bite right in between my eyes, just in time for an important job interview tomorrow. Grrr. The weather was lovely though, and we got to do some lazing on the beach which was wonderful.

But most importantly, here's reporting back about the recipes:

Boozy Campfire Cheese= MASSIVE hit. One camper said it was the best brie he'd ever had. Whoo! I used brandy, but part of me was left wondering if perhaps calvados or white wine and garlic would have been better...

Roasted Potatoes in tin foil: Divine! We sliced them into very, very thin slices with thin slices of onion, some garlic and bacon and roasted it on the fire. We made two big batches, one for dinner with sausages and some fish we cooked and then the rest with eggs in the morning

All in all, a WONDERFUL chow weekend! Next time I'm going to pre-prepare some skewers/kebabs of sort, that was a great idea I didn't get to take advantage of. I also didn't get to do the dough boys sadly, we had some low carb people on board, so it didn't seem worthwhile. Hence all the sausage!Thanks everyone so much for the recommendations!

Okay, so as of today (we leave today), here are the sure-fire recipes I will be making:1) Boozy campfire cheese2) Dough boys3) Sausages roasted over fire4) Braised beef (we braised it and are making a sauce for it now and will just throw it on the grill)5) S'mores 6) Banana Slugs7) Muffelattas if we can hustle and get organized today, but if not, it's going to go into rotation as a dinner/lunch!8) Tin foil prepared potatoes/onions with fish

Thank you everyone! I will report back and let you know how everything turned out.

Genius! I'm so making dough boys, what a novel idea! I'm probably just going to bring pillsbury dough or bring a box of biscuit mix.... the biscuit mix might yield more if we want to carb-load around the fire. Roasted potatoes also seem de rigeur, thanks for the suggestions Jamiek. Foodfuser, I feel like I need some sort of mental preparation to head into the dark forest, so I'm all for watching Cast Away. If I end up mumbling in my tent to a soccer ball, it's your fault though. If peregrine falcons attack, they will form the filling of my dough boy, I swear it!

Lexpatti, the muffaletta sounds like a brilliant idea. What's a shortcut for the olive salad? It seems like such an important part of the sandwich. Also, do you find the olive mixture makes the bread soggy at all?

Thanks everyone! I googled campfire recipes and found a grotesque/amazing recipe where you take a banana in its peel, slice along it's length horizontally to make an opening, stuff with chocolate and marshmallows. You then reseal, cover in foil and eat after everything has gone gooey. I think my pancreas would never forgive me for that one.

Thanks for all of the suggestions!! I am very excited by the Boozy Campfire cheese! Thank you for that link Tarheel, I am definitely going to buy some brie this week, drill holes, add brandy and pack for the trip. It sounds divine!FriedClam, all of your ideas are very good! S'mores are a must, i think sausage, cheese, chutneys etc would make for a great snack and the shrimp skewers too. Has anyone made a stew or anything like that while camping? We were going to bring some braised beef to heat up on the fire for our first meal...It's bad, I'm more interested in the food and wine than anything else!

That's some fork! Thank you for the sausage suggestion, I'll hunt out some good stuff. I recently tried the chorizo from the sausage place in Kensington and was pleasantly suprised, so maybe I'll bring that.

I'm going camping with some friends for a couple days this weekend and would love some tried and true menu recommendations. I'm pretty new to camping, so other than hot dogs and canned beans/canned chili etc, what is great to cook over a campfire? We'll be bringing pots and pans.

We'll be leaving Friday during the day and returning Sun. I had good luck once with fish in tin foil with lemon and onions and then garlicky vegetables and potatoes in another tin foil parcel. I'm guessing eggs and bacon/sausage for breakfast, I've had someone make pancakes which was kind of a nice treat. I'm also not particularly outdoorsy, so I'd be happy to spend time alone prepping a bit while people go wander into wasp's nests or whatever it is they do outdoors! ;)

I'm going camping with some friends for a couple days this weekend and would love some tried and true menu recommendations. I'm pretty new to camping, so other than hot dogs and canned beans/canned chili etc, what is great to cook over a campfire? We'll be bringing pots and pans.

We'll be leaving Friday during the day and returning Sun. I had good luck once with fish in tin foil with lemon and onions and then garlicky vegetables and potatoes in another tin foil parcel. I'm guessing eggs and bacon/sausage for breakfast, I've had someone make pancakes which was kind of a nice treat. I'm also not particularly outdoorsy, so I'd be happy to spend time alone prepping a bit while people go wander into wasp's nests or whatever it is they do outdoors! ;)

Thanks Edible, I'll try the curried shrimp + homestyle tofu, they both sound good. Great idea to sub the broccoli for the g. peppers!

Zen- New Treasure is the restaurant in the basement, I think it's a couple doors west of a Starbucks, right? A friend told me they've had excellent dim sum there- I've ordered a soup dish and a meat/veg dish to go from there once, which were actually both v. good. I think the slight shadiness/obscurity of the entrance stairwell somehow throws me off and usually sends me searching for food elsewhere. I will go in for dim sum.

On a side note- still love Yueh Tung. Judging from some of the mixed reviews, I really do think it's about what you order there. Some of the dishes sound a bit overdone/greasy, but I've enjoyed a really well-done, light chicken dish with veg. and cashews, I think their hot + sour soup is lovely (apart from the fact that they don't devein their shrimp, which sort of mars the taste, I'm thinking of just getting the veggie one next time or asking for no shrimp), their shrimp pakoras are guilty and delicious, as are their chili chicken and manchurian chicken. I just tried the manchurian chicken tonight and as heavy as it is, it was delightful.

So, I tried another Chow-recommended restaurant in the neighborhood, Spadina Garden, and am not sure what to think.

I ordered the chili peanut chicken after reading really rave reviews as a lunch special today, and was kind of grossed out by it. The heat was nice, but I found the whole thing WAY to sweet. The sweet, dripping dark sauce plus the fried/oily nature of the chicken wasn't what I was picturing at all. The large hunks of green pepper throughout didn't really do anything for the dish.

I just had a friend who's traveled China extensively tell me that Spadina Garden is great Szechuan restaurant, is there something that might be less sweet and more savoury/spicy? I don't mind a bit of sweetness to balance flavour, but a hugely sweet meat dish won't top my charts.

What's the crispy ginger beef like? I found the hot and sour soup to be pretty good though...still up in the air.